Look who’s in the jobless line: Bosses

By Nicole Lucht, Richard N. Velotta, Buck Wargo

Monday, June 29, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The biggest percentage increase in unemployment from May 2006 to May 2009 was among those in the ranks of management, state unemployment statistics show.

The number of managers filing for unemployment increased by 436 percent in that period, from 1,297 claims in 2006 to 6,950 three years later.

Analyst John Restrepo said many of those managers may have come from the hard-hit construction industry. “You get rid of the more expensive guys first, and then just spread around the work to the remaining guys,” he said.

Also hard-hit within management ranks, he said, were mid-level managers in corporate offices, many of whom lost jobs before those working in daily operations.

UNLV sociologist Robert Parker said management jobs are some of the first to be cut.

Overall, men outnumber women on Nevada’s unemployment rolls and the number of Hispanics filing jobless claims has grown much faster than with other ethnic groups, according to state statistics. Both sets of statistics show the effect of fewer construction jobs, employment analysts say.

From May 2006 to May 2009, the number of men filing jobless claims increased 372 percent, while claims filed by women increased by 250 percent.

Women may be finding more employment than men because they are drawn to health care services, an industry with some job growth.

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With home prices still dropping, sales of existing homes in the Las Vegas Valley matched the busy levels of September 2005, according to the latest report from SalesTraq.

The research firm said 4,476 existing homes sold in May, about 600 more than in April. Average home prices dropped to $122,000 but the drop from the previous month wasn’t as steep as previous month-to-month declines. But whether the slowing decline suggests prices are stabilizing remains to be seen, because another wave of foreclosed homes hitting the market could depress prices further, analysts say.

Sixty-four percent of the existing homes sold in May were foreclosures, with a median price of $106,000, SalesTraq said.

Housing is “the problem that won’t go away” because there is not enough demand for the current inventory, Keith Schwer, director of UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research, said last week at a midyear economic outlook at the Mirage.

“At best we are seeing a slowdown in the rate of descent, which, should these observations hold, gives us the beginning of the end of the most difficult period since the Great Depression,” he said.

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For all that we know about tourists coming to Las Vegas — their age, how they get here, how often they come in a year, how long they stay and where they spend their money — one fact has eluded tourism experts for years: How much time do visitors spend walking along the Strip?

It’s a factoid important to the companies that operate mobile billboards. They want to be able to tell customers how many eyes see their ads.

And now we have answers, thanks to the folks who do the on-the-street surveys for the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority, and numbers-cruncher Jeremy Aguero, who asked the surveyors to ask some specific questions in 400 tourist interviews, and then extrapolated the results with help from some known data.

Among the findings:

• The average visitor walks about four hours on the Strip (and visits about six resorts along the way).

• Any given hour of any given day, about 17,700 people are walking on the Strip. It’s about double that during the peak evening hours, and only about a third of that at sunrise.

Aguero said the research was conducted in March.

Whether those numbers will hold up this week — with temperatures topping 100 degrees — is unknown, but we’re betting there will be fewer people strolling along the Strip in the middle of the day.